Reflections of an integral mind and heart on life, love, sex, God, healing, psychotherapy and everything.

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Thursday, March 22, 2018

Alleviating Pain Vs. True Healing

There is a fundamental difference between true healing and mere alleviation of pain, symptoms or discomfort.

True to its meaning - to make whole - healing involves the integration of various parts of the psyche which the self had been disconnected from or hasn’t yet fully expressed.

Alleviating pain doesn’t remedy a fragmentation of the system. Even if the physical or emotional pain subsides, if the disconnected part of the self hasn’t been integrated together with the pain alleviation, it will find expression later on either as the same pain returning, or as a different kind of symptom or discomfort.

Deep, profound healing is not a linear or comfortable process. Integrating younger parts leads to revisiting older experiences in order to bring the experiential unfinished business to completion. What feels like a regression takes you to feeling old sensations and emotional feelings, crave foods that you ate in a specific time period, even remember songs and fragrances from that particular time. You may touch upon an old pain but this time you will be equipped with greater clarity, insight and skills to address that pain and resolve it from its root. Healing culminates with a new decision made from the perspective of the current mature self, quite different in its nature that the then necessary, but now dated decisions that your younger self had made during the original hurt.

The body-felt experience of integration may subsequently lead you through pressure and tension, then tremors, then vibrations, then chills and cold, and eventually a spacious, glowing flow.

The bigger picture of your life will reflect true healing with greater insights, clarity and creativity; your actions might be more courageous, purposeful, consistent, and effective. You know that you have deeply transformed when your resourceful actions surprise not only your family, friends, and co-workers, but your own good self!

Author’s note: this post is written while listening to an old Electric Light Orchestra album and feeling like her teen self!